There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
-Raoul Duke

Intentions

I arrived in Syracuse, NY and escaped as planned in my newly-acquired ’88 Dodge, speeding into the Canadian winter wonderland with every intention of sucking the life out of every moment that I encountered. Dressed in black, masked up, layering my thin California skin against the wrath of Persephone, I had every intention of doing what we do best – turning an idea, absurd, slippery and unmanageable, into resolute action with a resultant outcome of epicness. I know the formula. However, expressed in this way the “idea” is only an ideal problem, which in reality takes on an unsettling and radical complexity. The problem was, perhaps, in the way I had become accustomed to how our band operated; firstly in our interdependency and then in our relative immunity. Crossing the border into Canada, I screamed through like a drunk whirlwind, smoke from a California sage bundle pouring through the windows, blasting leftover dubstep which had fermented in a Tupperware container with the lid taped down so it wouldn’t spill, jumping around in the passenger seat, totally unaware that I was radically out of place. The topographical fractilisation finally evidenced itself when I pulled into Niagara Falls to stare at a tailrace now inaccessible. I have clearly underestimated the impact that seeing the Belly of the Beast sewn shut would have on my explorer constitution. Soberly drinking a very well made whiskey sour, I took a photo of Niagara falls with the other tourists and drove off to park in some farmers crop where I slept in the car, shivering and bored.

Fissure

It occurred to me in a frostbitten hallucination that the photos I took were not flatly captured do to any technical limitation but because of the lack of required investment in either meaningful human exchange at the moment of shutter release nor interesting endeavour toward the moment of acquisition. A determination as to which of these factors was leading to my disillusionment became a primary goal for the trip.

But the fear set in with the realization that the expectant fracturilisation had begun to make it’s move from spatial to psychological. Mental processes began to take unrecognisable forms which, at times, could only be understood in moments of lucid dreaming or utopic drug visions. My PhD thesis began acting as a gravitational tractor beam, pulling me back to the mother ship as I continued to struggle toward the liberating slavery where my work could be completed in an appropriately manly fashion. This seemingly productive internal feedback loop taking me to ‘work’ however, in this context, led me to a constant sensual disenfranchisement that I had forgotten in London. The pinnacle came in Chatham, Ontario, where the car broke down and I was yanked from it by a thick-necked Canadian with a machine gun who told me I ‘had a mouth on me’. He seized the vehicle, called me in a ‘transient’, and left me standing in sub-zero temperatures with my roly suitcase. It was fucking cold.

Disillusioned

I left the burning, green fluid-spurting car with the police and escaped Canada on a boarder-hopping shuttle full of old people without event. I caught a plane from Detroit. My line of flight to Minnesota was not to be realised and I called Darlinclem from the airport, impossibly bitter. Sweet as ever, she agreed to reschedule our Subterranean Twin City rampage for the summer.

Upon arriving in Las Vegas, the suggested endpoint for my roadtrip that barely happened, it occurred to me that the required to remedy for the situation was some old school Place Hacking. A quick personal database query revealed an aircraft boneyard halfway to LA and I hit the road. Arrival revealed incomprehensible dereliction, dozens of square miles of dead planes, military housing, cinemas, shopping malls and a giant hospital now used for urban military training. All required sneaking around inside the defunct George Air Force Base, now the Southern California Logistics Airport. It felt a lot like an abandoned Soviet military base in Poland. Except for the tumbleweeds and sand. And paintball remnants. Well that and there weren’t statues of Lenin everywhere. I guess they weren’t really that similar.

Warning signs

Not that sneaky

Places

Not that freaky

I was relying on known variables here trying to rip space into time with my subtle knife, creating temporal amalgamations and fresh spatiotemporalexperiential concoctions with salt and lime. My own past was here somewhere, past the Canadian ice sheets and industrial ruins of Detroit, here in a desert full of tumbleweeds, sagebrush, jackrabbits, adobe and agave. This past had to retain it’s juvenile viscerality, that recognition that it’s articulation historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was’. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. But the danger coalesced limply. Rather than London riot police attacking me with batons, I found overweight security guards easily converted though commiseration with their existential misery. I kept praying for military police to show up so Silent Motion would descend from a rooftop to take one in the eye with a ninja star while Patch kicked another through a wall with his famous swift boot. Everyone I encountered was so apathetic, they didn’t even care what my mission was, why I was wearing a giant cowboy hat covered in bodhi seeds or for what reason I was photographing their derelict hospital. The contrast between the furiousness of their illusions of control and the lacklustre enforcement of the stated boundaries was nothing short of disheartening. Freedom without boundaries is pointless.

I'm doing this

For no reason

Despite my misgivings, the moments of encounter between the present and the past, experienced through physically exploring abandoned architecture, uncovered that old embodied practice that mirrors the role of the archaeologist assaying surface material without deep excavation to analyse the character a place, as expected. It’s just that I undertook my surface survey of affectation by making connections more topologically than topographically these days. I successfully temporarily inhabited those sites of material history and constructed assemblages of emotional and memorial attachments that melded pluritemporal geographic, historical and experiential imagination, perhaps one day subject to nostalgic romanticism and that was sort of satisfying. But they remained, in my mind, the product of a life left behind, each composition an infantile regression. As such, I revisited those sites of old from my research, a babe suckling a solipsistic personal history missing all my favourite characters.

In the end, it is the decentralization of disruptive energy created by my need to tug my thread into the desert that is causing the angst behind it all. I need it. I know that. At the same time, the media connectivity feeding me streams of information from the home I left, knowing that I am here to produce a theoretical contribution that neither I, or anyone I have come to respect by now cares much about also lingers. But more than that, it is the realisation that the dream of freedom I was taught as a child is a sham. The United States is not the land of the free, it is the land of the subjugated, the apathetic and the weak while the fight rages on in Europe and North Africa for the future world we will inhabit. My throat is dry while the deserts of the Middle East run red with the blood of a desire the population in this derelict desert has forgotten is theirs to take. And so I write.

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others”
-Pericles

Departure

When I started Place Hacking two years ago, I conceived of it as a place to get ideas out, a place to dry run new thoughts, a repository for all the weird shit in my head. Over time though, it’s taken on a new form, a life of it’s own to a degree. As I scroll though the photos of our various adventures, I realise that Place Hacking has become one of the story threads of a community that we didn’t really know was forming. I am implicated everywhere; as an ethnography, I don’t know how I could have dug any deeper or threaded myself any tighter.

Hand crafted

The community we have built in London, especially in the past year, is unprecedented. Our move from ruin exploration to urban camping trips to infrastructure to elicit parties and urban adventuring led to a mend between “teams” in the London community to the point that we almost can’t even tell what the “teams” are anymore. We all go out together now, night after night, cracking new tube, locating new drain junctions, sharing ideas, refining techniques and getting more stuff done more quickly than ever in the history of London exploration. Our hosting of the IDM this year, spurred by Otter, and the organisation of multiple events that have connected us to the larger international community really indicates to me that London exploration has come of age. Let it be written that it wasn’t always so!

Written and rewritten

To an extent, we have also begun to redefine what urban exploration is to the wider UK scene. This began, I think, with the move into infrastructure, to infiltration, but also with our desire for desire, the point at which we decided that enjoying what we were doing was more important than whose toes we stepped on or which ‘codes’ we subscribed to.

Urban exploration as a practice requires a bit of a leap to decide to turn a wild idea into action. But it takes another brave leap to take responsibility over aspirations for more depth in the practice. At some point, we decide that not only would we go into places, we would also do what we like while in them, whether that meant throwing a party, sleeping in them or changing the locks and seizing disused space as our urban playgrounds. In all honesty, what we put on the internet to showcase London’s potential is probably half of what we have accomplished. I will let your mind wander about what kind of fun may have taken place but rest assured it’s been nothing short of a beautiful rampage.

From a different angle

And so, with a bitter taste in my mouth I announce that I left London. In fact, right now, as I type this, I am sitting on a plane. Two hours ago, I checked in a bag full of high vis, waders, camera gear, torches, tripods, hard drives, a sleeping bag and a Neil Stephenson novel – everything I need to survive really. I’m on a mission to return to LA and Sin City, the sands from which I emerged so long ago, to sit quietly and write our stories. I have chosen to give up my cherished role as an agitator to become a scribe for our tribe. It has to be done – the myths and legends of this age can’t go unrecorded. I am determined, above all else, to make sure that whoever comes after us knows that in a world rendered increasingly mundane, we refused to let adventure die.

Slipping

My decision to leave the city has broken my heart more than I could have ever imagined. London, for me, will always be the place where the world was cracked open; where I realized the core was full of scorching, beautiful light; London will always be the place where it became impossible to ignore the potential in everything.

Potentially exciting

This potential was unleashed one last time in what had to be the most bizarre and wonderful subterranean party in South London history, put together by Winch, to see me off. The crew snuck into a space 30 meters under the city dragging a massive sound system hooked up to a car battery, lights and cases of Belgian beer picked up on Winch’s last trip to the Continent. I walked into a surprise party of epic proportions populated by all the usual suspects and a few fresh faces. We played Bunker Frisbee, undertook bolt climbing practice upside down on the walls, spayed each other with champagne, made ridiculous gushing speeches, ran through the tunnels screaming, we puked, we danced. It was bliss.

Bunker Party (photo by Gigi)

Determined to keep the mood going, when this planes lands in Syracuse, NY, I will get into my friend Erika Sigvardsdotter’s 1988 Dodge that she left behind after she returned to Sweden and drive across the United States toward the Wild West via Canada, sleeping in ruins along the way. My first major stop will be Detroit, the heart of US industrial urban exploration where I will search, alone and with no knowledge of the city, for glitches and ruptures to exploit. After that, I will head to the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul (MSP), to go underground with Shotgun Mario, Darlingclem and the infamous MSP heavy hitters.

Too ambitious?

I will miss London. More importantly though, I will miss my friends. When I began exploring with the Can Openers, I expected to learn more about the city. I also hoped to become a better filmmaker and photographer (which I have, though I’ve got a long way to go still!). What I didn’t expect was to reach a to find some sort of divine wisdom in that dank, wet, cold city. In London, through our explorations, I finally found the desire to be a part of a community where I have always felt like the geek standing on the side in every other group. It has been such a blessing to find more geeks like me who were not content with virtual adventure and who strive to make the impossible possible.

Unvirtual

In the end, I found a community full of practitioners who aren’t afraid to try something new. I have found a community who, when I see their name pop up on my iPhone, make my heartbeat accelerate because I know when I pick it up, something daring will ensue. I have found a community of people that I respect on the deepest level for their audacity, bravery, courage and passion.

I have never felt bonds so strong – we have entrusted our lives to each other so many times that we have become nothing short of a band of raiders. I often used to imagine us as the Band of the Hawk from Berserk or a World of Warcraft raiding guild until I realised at some point that I couldn’t even sit through movies or play video games anymore because our lives were more fun than what was one the screen. We killed my desire for media through embodied experience – what a revolution that is in this age!

Out there it's

Better than a video game

This community has pushed me, time and time again, to put down the pen and to pick up the passion. What they were teaching me the whole time, I now think, was to learn to live in the present. Surprise. After years of roaming the world looking for magical wisdom hidden is some drippy Australian rain forest, practicing yoga and meditation on Hawaii beaches, and chillin out with Native Americans in Nothern California, it took a bunch of urbanites with cameras to show me that every moment in life must be lived with the upmost respect, care and appreciation. It took a group of what I thought in the beginning to be alternative historians to show me that there is nothing glamorous about nostalgia and that we own the future, come what may! The only thing that really matters is what we do with each of these sacred moments.

Picked through

Although I am going away to try and make good on the investment this community has made in me, I can never repay them for all they have done – it was the essence of life itself offered to me, a drink from a chalice that made us all immortal. From Canada to Detroit to MSP to Sin City, I feel like I now travel with an awareness that will never fail me, London watching my every move with a wry smirk. So while Place Hacking may morph into something else over the next few months while I write up, I know it must and I am not afraid – because everything changes.

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and nights. But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge. You would know in words that which you have always known in thought. You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.
–The Prophet

Urban dreams

Part I

Desire was everywhere when we stepped of the plane at Charles de Gaulle. We nipped and yelped, scurrying into the city wearing rags and muddied bags, dragging tripods down the walls of Métro tunnels like Freddy Krueger. The thirst, after weeks of depraved scholarship, endless perverted workdays and inert meetings over coffee, had concretised into the force of a tsunami. The wave broke at times around tall objects, splitting and climbing for a moment before splashing down again in a liquid slump of ecstasy. At other junctions, it snaked into infrastructural gaps too small for bodies. We followed the water to find the glitches in the system, trying out various keys and tools for which the original intended purpose was never understood, lost artefacts from another time, rediscovered by our nomadic band of forgotten disciples. We bled and drank, crawling into our sleeping bags when we could smell the bread baking, the delicious olfactory beacon warning us the City of Light had switched on for the day.

Desire wasn’t purchased, nor did we try to sell it. At the same time, it was a profitable endeavour, an investment in the communication of the incommunicable, a necessary departure from direct economic production. Urbanity is codified by a set of rules which creates spirals of economic ‘prosperity’, where relentless velocity must be maintained to preserve the perpetual accumulation of wealth, resources and labour. The result is a system which reproduces itself in ceaseless iterations like a demonic fractal art project, even (or even especially) when those accumulations are superfluous or unnecessary, until it pops.

Juxtapositions

The result? An endless stacked stratigraphy of miscommunications, abortions and aberrations, interminable confusion about what could and should have been, sparkling smiles as the successful accumulation is directed into personal coffers, suicide from bridges where it does not. What sprawls all around us everyday, whether we are in London, Milan, Paris or Los Angeles is a capitalist monstrosity that regrows heads as you slice them off. Our only advantage against this unkillable and utterly beautiful beast is its immensity, for it is this very horrific attribute that allows us to run underneath unnoticed while it spews poison in the Siene.

Endlessly fractal

Part II

“Ah! Paris! What a beautiful city, don’t you think?”
“I don’t give a shit, what I wanted to do was ride the Métro.”
-Zazie dans le métro

As Dsankt told me while we wobbled toward each other in some subterranean dungeon, until you get over that initial dereliction fetish and prepare to let all things come and go, you haven’t found it yet. So as each sparkling moment expands toward the implosion we all know is coming, we feed the system. And when the engorged stomach lining finally tears, we will climb inside it’s dead body like Luke Skywalker penetrating his gutted Ton-tonand become enlightened.

A thousand blessings to Marc Explo, our tireless host. Thank you also to Winch and Otter for your brotherly companionship all weekend and to Olivier, Kat, Dsankt and Mrs. Dsankt for the wonderful dinner and champagne, delightful conversation and company as we climbed through sewage to get to a bridge.

The first big event of 2011 already went down. Literally. This year’s International Drain Meet (IDM) was hosted by London, organized by Otter at Silent UK. It was the largest meeting of the international draining community in London’s history with over 50 people from 6 countries in a large overflow chamber under Knightsbridge. We had drainers from the UK, Sweden, Italy, France, USA and Australia, including the UE Kingz, Brescia Underground and the Cave Clan. We also had a heavy contingent of the massively fun Manchester drainer contingent.

We also seem to have finally melded the two top London crews at this meet through Siologen’s powers of healing oration (see below). By the end of the night, Jon Doe, the King of UK draining, conjured himself out of thin air in the middle of the party to the delight of everyone in attendance. It was, by all accounts, one of the best gatherings in London urban explorer history. A full write up can be found on Winch’s blog.

Otter was kind enough to ask me to film the event since he was busy organizing all night. Here is my contribution – it is best viewed on full screen with the volume turned up loud enough to assault your neighbours.

The first empty Redstripe can spiked onto the security fence followed by another empty precariously placed on a ledge waiting for the next little gust of wind to send it spiralling into the River Lea clearly indicated that the Goblinmerchant and Brosa were already inside. But when Silent Motion and the girls rolled up, they found the dejected pair with the rogue Sophie dancing around a fifth of Famous Grouse playing tag with the demons of the night. The window was jammed.

Two hours of death-defying acrobatics followed. We all knew with Silent Motion there we weren’t walking away. The popping sound of the fire exit opening 40 minutes later was consequently rather satisfying, given how miserably cold we all were lying huddled around our empty Grouse bottle drawing straws to see who would be eaten first while we waited for the early-morning train from the Far East back to more respectable South London Boroughs.

Post-apocalyptic imaginaries were abandoned as we walked through the door.

In the presence

Of Bazalgette

Being in such close presence to Joseph Bazalgette, hero of London sewage, urban exploration and architectural aesthetics, was instantly sobering. Standing in the main hall, it become clear that Bazalgette was mad as a hatter when he built this absurd monstrosity of shit-pumpage. But as Jack Kerouac writes in On The Road,

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

We were all on the same team here. It was clear to everyone in attendance that Bazalgette was there too, raving and craving, clawing and lusting, climbing and laughing. We went into a wild Bacchian frenzy. It was movable feast of affectual affordances as twisted Victorian metal was transmuted into swing and ladders, balance beams and gaps to jump. We played limbo under their security gates, we crawled on all fours across half-submerged pipes and used the derelict phone system to call the security hut and tell them they lost the game.

We don't need

To ask for

Permission

_________________________

The truth is that Silent Motion and I needed some time to play. We had been fighting police in the streets, sat in sub-zero kettles, setting fire to the city to keep warm for a month straight as part of the student protests. It felt like life had quickly become so serious. Even urban exploration had taken an ominous turn after other explorers started crying about our A-team exploits. One detractor even labelled our crew “the London can openers” which I quite liked.

Spot the can opener

Our participation in particular types of exploration, our participation in the riots that most explorers chose to ignore while they sad at home madly bashing their keyboards in frustration, our participation in whatever the fuck gets us pumped up is a reminder, however sad, that as Winch has said before, there is no UrbEx community, there are just friends who enjoy hanging out with each other. Some are braver than others. Some explore for the glory, some for the fun. Some walk in the track of others. Some blaze new trails. Some try to make things a little more fun. As Statler says, there are no rules to UrbEx, there’s just where your morals fit and as Sartre once wrote about the philosophy teacher Mathieu, “he could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.”

We needed this night to remind ourselves that this is what we are capable of. Elegance was reaped by bringing along a visitor to London for the weekend to experience a night out that wouldn’t be soon forgotten. We fed on that initial wonder that comes with realizing that yeah, you can just do this.

Let's

Just do this

Being free doesn’t require consent and we don’t need to ask permission to explore, not from the government, other explorers or your mum. No matter how much frustration we brew, how serious our work gets or how intense our lives may become, we are reminded through urban exploration that all it really takes to feel free again is the initiative to walk away from it all and rewrite the rules for a night. Disclaimer? There is none.

The photo of Silent Motion the can opener was kindly provided by Nicholas Adams at Guerilla Photography.

The Red Stripes and Famous Grouse were provided, on discount, by Emron from Pakistan at my corner shop who still wants me to make a documentary about his quest to abandon the family business to become a pilot.

The word were kindly provided by my brain, via my fingers during some sort of synaptic process that still eludes me.